Hiraeth
by L'esprits De L'escaliers
Summary: After spending eighteen years on the prolific train, Nyssa thought the end of her story obvious: she would live the rest of her life trapped in the metal creature only to die a lonely death. It crashing was never a part of anyone's plan, but now that it has she is forced to face an entirely new reality with someone she thought dead: Curtis Everett. [ Curtis x OC ]


**Disclaimer:** The Snowpiercer screen play [based on the graphic novel _Le Transperceneige_ by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette] was written by Bong Joon-Ho and Kelly Masterson. This story is in no way associated with any of its respective owners including the primary distributors RADiUS-TWC and CJ Entertainment. All original content belongs to its intellectual creator [myself] and should not be used for ulterior purposes without prior permission.

**Summary:** After spending eighteen years on the prolific train, Nyssa thought the end of her story obvious: she would live the rest of her life trapped in the metal creature only to die a lonely death. It crashing was never a part of anyone's plan, but now that it has she is forced to face an entirely new reality with someone she thought dead: Curtis Everett. [ Curtis x OC ]

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******Hiraeth** is homesickness for a place one can never return to or perhaps a place which maybe never was. It is the nostalgia, the yearning, and the grief for the lost places of their past that they can never return to. For some this is a feeling thought of as nothing more than 'longing', but for others it is a deeply rooted sentiment which only those who are connected by personal experience can begin to imagine. In the case of those who lived aboard the prolific train for eighteen years **hiraeth** is, and will always be, their desire to return to the beginning – to return to the time when ice, kronole, and the train were completely separate entities.**  
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There were nights that a young woman allowed herself to dream of a time where her biggest worry was getting lost on her first day of college, but they had grown to be far and few between. As time everything about the old world had faded into a pastel picture with dimmed details that were filled in with things that felt as though they belonged – the missing gaps in her memories often drove her mad. However, the female knew she could not succumb to those malignant feelings which bubbled in her breast and in an effort to shove them back into their cage she began focusing on the one thing that remained constant within her own. The rattling of wheels was a soft background noise that never dimmed no matter where she stood in the thousand-and-one cars. There were fluctuations in its pitch and tone as the road changed of course, but after six thousand five hundred and seventy days she could name ever alteration. There were times in which the steel wheels turned smoothly against their equally shiny counterpart and others where they whined sharply against the bitter ice.

If one listened close enough they could hear the screeching wheels struggling to keep aligned with the track that day along with the impending screams of those who were about to take their last breath.

She felt herself thrown from the spot where she stood in the sleeping compartment's hall, her shoulder colliding with a thickly trimmed frame before her face met the parallel silver wall. The gurgling beast then threw her to the floor without care for her well being and showered her with pain, thus a fire crept up her spine and glittering shards embedded themselves in her pristine arms. For a moment she swore the screams that filled the car were her own, but when nothingness followed the young woman realized that it was the screeching of metal which she could not shake. The car she had lived in and grown to love over the past decade cried out when it scrapped against sediment.

There was no longer a faint clicking of steel wheels against the track or whimper against ice. No. Instead she was greeted with something that anyone who had lived in the prolific train feared. Even the train babies knew that the quiet was a fickle creature not to be awoken for a lack of noise was the voice of Death. Whether by grand design or pure luck she was not met with nothingness though for somewhere in the background a crackling of fire and crunching of glass kept the creature at bay. For as long as she could remember those who operated the train had badgered into their heads one sentiment – 'if the engine stops everyone aboard the train will freeze and die' – and yet even in her rattled state of mind the female knew this was no longer true. By some miracle of god or curse of the devil she had lived long enough to see both the creation and destruction of the giant metal beast whose hollowed corpse she now lay in.

It took the young woman several minutes to find the will to pull her body into an upright position and when she succeeded she wish she had not. The world had become a blending of colors, millions of them spinning before her eyes before melding into a singular thought: pain. An inhumane screech ran through her body the moment the colors stopped bleeding, her bones shaking as rogue fingers desperately gripped the carpet. Her entire body felt as though it had caught fire with the wreckage and yet somewhere, deep down in her blackened soul, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. The chances of being in the sleeping compartment this time of day were slim to none when all the blissful activities the first class were taken into consideration; even more unlikely was the chances of being in the hallway where none of the heavy furniture could crush her small frame. She knew that any person who happened to be in bed was most likely a pile of flesh and bone beneath a heavy steel frame now, a poor soul who Death had come to collect and escort to Hell.

Luck or any variation of the word was one that made laughter bubble up in her chest, but it was not an ordinary laughter – no. It was a heavy, psychotic laughter that peeled her crimson caked lips apart and bubbled over with hysterics. The deranged female was anything but lucky and anything but alive for, in her mind, she had died many times several years ago. She died eighteen years ago that she died when a guard shoved her into a train. She died seventeen years ago when the last shreds of her humanity were ripped from her body and cast aside like garbage. She died thirteen years ago when she was plucked from the ravel and deposited into a society that wanted her no more than a bug beneath their shoe.

She died long ago, but perhaps how she could live.

It was only after her hysterics died down that she finally scrapped her body from the shards of broken fixtures and made her way towards what was once a door that connected the sleeping compartment to more prestigious item. Her feet dragged for several inches before she gained the strength to take actual steps which sent sharp pricks up her spine. If it were under any other circumstances she might have given up on the spot and pray the pain end, but she refused to waver now. The female continued to trudge through the creaking metal as strength gradually returned to her aching limbs, the taste of the cold burning her lips. At the end of the tunnel a flurry of powder blue droplets filtered in through the open gate, they dancing across the ground and landing upon a rich plum blanket which she wrapped around her body moments before stepping out into the end of the runnel which housed the warped carcass of the once prolific train.

Another three steps forward and she found herself faced with the outside world, a glittering palace of snow and ice that she never thought she would breathe. There was little time to take in her surroundings though as a girl came running towards the older female, she babbling in a foreign language before dragging her newfound counterpart towards what appeared to be the burning heart. The only words that could be made out from amongst the labored gasps and coughing fits were that of 'hurt', 'not dead', and a name Miss Nyssa Parthenope had known once upon a dream.

Curtis Everett.


End file.
